From New Product Introductions to Acquisitions

Drive Strategic Growth

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IntroductionEvery business needs to keep growing to remain relevant. But the pressure to hit revenue targets and exceed investor expectations can be intense, especially if you’re trying to squeeze every dollar from a strategy that has run its course. In order to drive growth, leaders often turn to organic and inorganic growth strategies to reinvigorate sales.

This drive for growth puts the burden on sales leaders to navigate through change and hit sky-high expectations. It’s a very “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” function where expectations can get ahead of reality. Luckily, salespeople are inherently optimistic and ambitious.

Bain research indicates that the average company promises to increase revenue at twice the market average. While very few companies actually come close to achieving that level of growth, sales leaders need a path forward to unlock the right sales strategy.

In this e-book, we’ll take a deeper look into how companies can drive strategic growth. We’ll dive into the different approaches companies might use to enhance their go-to-market efforts, and we’ll share best practices for using technology to meet modern employee and customer needs.

Business Strategies can be categorized with

three main goals in mind:

Drive Strategic GrowthImplement, measure, and execute new go-to-market strategies for reaching new customers or untapped markets.

Boost Sales ProductivityEmpower sales teams to sell smarter and faster by using sales intelligence to prioritize the highest-impact actions and maximize each team member’s potential.

Win & Grow CustomersUse deep customer knowledge to deliver personalized, seamless buying experiences — both to bring in new customers and to effectively retain, cross-sell, and upsell existing ones.

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INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................02

CHAPTER 1 Obstacles to Top-Line Growth...............................................04

CHAPTER 2 Framework to Drive Strategic Growth................................06

CHAPTER 3 Mergers & Acquisitions.............................................................08

CHAPTER 4 New Product Introduction......................................................10

CHAPTER 5 New Routes to Market & New Hires....................................12

CHAPTER 6 New Markets or Regions..........................................................14

CONCLUSION From Strategy to Action.......................................................16

ContentS

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CHAPTER 1

Obstacles to Top-Line GrowthWhen growth stalls, executives look to make significant changes to either their product portfolio, target markets, or go-to-market alignment. These changes can have a major impact on top-line growth. Choosing and executing the right sales strategy requires significant up-front work to ensure targets can be achieved. Sales leaders must triangulate customer data, go-to-market expertise, and economic trends to organize their teams. The next page outlines the top obstacles most organizations face.

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39.4%of organizations said

they can easily adapt to a customer’s needs.

Poor Sales AlignmentOne of the major impediments businesses face whileundertaking strategic growth is the inability to puta flexible sales process around M&A (mergers and acquisitions), new product introduction, or other expansion activities. Even the best-laid plans for growth and expansion will require pivots or tweaks.

No Visibility Into What Drives GrowthStrategic growth initiatives require sales to build a new muscle. In order to help sales teams grow, leaders need visibility into the activities and trends that move pipeline forward so they can share best practices at scale.

Incomplete View of the CustomerData required to execute strategic growth initiatives is often siloed across front- and back-office systems. This hampers sales teams from understanding a customer’s complete purchasing journey.

29%of companies are good at turning analytics into action.

81%of sales reps believe it is

important to have a connected view of data across the entire

customer journey in order to drive sales.

Salesforce

Only

Only

Forrester

CSO Insights

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CHAPTER 2

Framework TO DRIVE STRATEGIC GROWTHIn the rest of this e-book, we’ll explore different methods for pursuing strategic growth. In each of these methods, we have identified how having the technology to properly define sales processes, identify and track KPIs, and uncover insights is vital to having a successful outcome. But first, let’s define and explore the importance of each step in that model.

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Define and Implement Sales ProcessesThe first step is to standardize how sales reps engage with customers. Take the time to implement your plan by automating as much as possible to guide sales through your growth strategy. Bake in best practices and recommendations at every stage of the process. Know that no strategy to grow is fail-proof. Remain flexible as you identify opportunities to refine your strategy or supporting processes at scale.

IDENTIFY and Track KPIsNext, establish benchmarks and identify how to clearly measure success. It’s important to clearly state critical KPIs in order to align all stakeholders. As you go through your go-to-market motions, provide real-time data to highlight what’s working and what’s not. Great sales teams use dashboards to create leaderboards that gamify sales and motivate teams. Understand that data, visibility, and measurement are key to managing a new strategy and the adoption of a new process.

Unlock InsightsFinally, empower sales with deep customer insights by integrating back-office or third-party data to provide the most accurate and complete view of your customer. Access to data insights is fast becoming a key differentiator for top sales teams. Being able to access customers’ data for business insights gives sales teams a head start when it comes to prioritizing leads, forecasting, and building deeper customer relationships.

Access to data insights is fast becoming a key differentiator for top sales teams.

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CHAPTER 3

Mergers & AcquisitionsGrowth through M&A provides sales leaders with access to additional customers, markets, and products to make their number. It also comes with a giant spotlight as executives turn to sales to make this new relationship profitable. The two primary objectives sales leaders face are to:

Retain and grow customers from the just acquired company

Merge sales teams while retaining the best talent

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Define and Implement Sales ProcessesAdding a company’s offerings to the acquirer’s product portfolio can dramatically alter how sales approaches the combined customer base. Automating how to cross-sell and upsell both companies products and services can help quickly capture post-close revenue synergies. To enable revenue growth at scale, sales executives must be able to test different sales cadences and implement best practices at scale across the newly combined sales organization.

IDENTIFY and Track KPIsAchieving quick wins is great, but understanding what makes sales reps successful is critical for sustained success. By having a real-time view of sales performance, sales executives can identify the activities that make reps successful, then make the proper adjustments across their organization. Remember, no initial sales strategy is 100% right at first, especially when two or more companies have been brought together.

Unlock InsightsIn order to achieve lasting synergies through M&A, businesses must unify and streamline business processes across the entire enterprise. This distributed structure makes it crucial for businesses to quickly integrate systems, applications, and databases in order to get business processes up and running in synchronization. Having a single source of truth, either by performing extract, transform, load (ETL) processes or building integrations, will make it easier to accurately run customer reports and forecast sales.

Remember that the M&A process

is not a single event. It’s an

ongoing project that can take

years before it’s “complete.” When

Marriott International bought

Starwood Hotels (the company

that owned hotel brands like

the Westin, W, Sheraton, and St.

Regis), it took them years before

they fully integrated their two

rewards programs, and tweaks

still continue to this day. The key

to success is having a system that

can adapt as each company’s

people, processes, and data are

merged together.

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CHAPTER 4

New Product IntroductionSales often struggles with new product introduction because reps gravitate toward products they are familiar with. How do you get reps out of their comfort zone? The trick is to remove friction through the combination of automation, analytics, and insights to help reps uncover and advance new product opportunities.

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Define and Implement Sales ProcessesCreating a repeatable, automated process is essential when launching a new product. This requires flexible sales tools as reps refine the best ways to sell. When best practices are identified, sales leaders must be able to quickly adapt their sales processes to drive revenue. For example, if account executives are better at following up on webinar leads than inside sales, then sales leaders need to be able to quickly change lead routing rules to a sales rep who is best equipped to convert the target customer.

IDENTIFY and Track KPIsTracking and analyzing pipe progression is critical for new product launches that have no historical data to benchmark against. Sales leaders should look beyond macro indicators such as lead conversions and close rates to identify how deals are won. Micro indicators such as activities and meetings booked can help sales leaders understand the trends that move their business. For example, if it takes three call connects to get a prospect meeting, sales leaders can gamify call connects through a leaderboard as a way to gamify and measure activities.

Unlock InsightsHow products and services are delivered is changing as new entrants create a wedge between incumbents and their customers. Data on consumer behavior, such as information from a Point of Sale system, can be used to help sales teams understand intent. Augmenting CRM data with back-office data will help unlock propensity to buy behaviors to help sales focus on high-value activities. This will help sales leaders better forecast sales, create territories, and set more accurate targets.

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CHAPTER 5

New Routes to Market & New HiresSales leaders employ new routes to market in order to optimize a sales channel for a customer’s needs, behaviors, and buying expectations. There are essentially three ways to employ this strategy:

Create or expand internal sales teams

Launch a self-service commerce channel

Partner with third-party organizations

In the past, testing and implementing a new route to market was a very manual process to coordinate.

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Define and Implement Sales ProcessesWhen launching new routes to market, it’s important to automate as much as possible to remove friction from the new process. The goal should be to ensure the sales channel understands the customer and best practices needed to expeditiously close a deal. Routes through indirect sales channels often evolve over time as best practices between the partner and your company are identified. Channel account managers need the flexibility, tools, and technology to provide one-to-one feedback, training, enablement, and deal support to empower their partner channel.

IDENTIFY and Track KPIsIn order to successfully add new routes to market, sales leaders must be able to measure performance across sales channels. This requires visibility into three key areas:

1. Customers: The channels you choose to use must be those that your target customers actually use to buy. Be sure to track conversion rates and revenue generated against your target demographic to ensure your route is optimized for your target customers.

2. Cost: Adding new routes to market only makes sense if they are profitable. Dashboards should be kept to track customer acquisition costs by channel to ensure that expensive channels are not used to sell commodity products.

3. Complexity: The third dimension to measure is time and level of effort to acquire. Though imperfect, complexity can be measured by time and the resources allocated for customer acquisition on a given route.

These KPIs should be shared broadly across the business since routes-to-market optimization is a collaboration between sales, marketing, distribution, and partners. The reports should be used to drive accountability and reinforce positive performance.

Unlock InsightsThe heart of the route to market methodology is the seamless coordination between sales, marketing, and your distribution network. This requires companies to standardize across existing processes, integrate new ecosystems and value chains, and drive new business opportunities. A proven strategy unlocking additional insights includes:

1. Creating building blocks: Leverage APIs to externalize data and functionality from core systems like partner information into discrete, consumable services.

2. Orchestrate processes: Enable cross-functional access to these processes and combine them into new workflows that help every team understand how customer behaviors and intent affect sales.

3. Expose assets as a service: Increase scale and create new business opportunities by leveraging a shared library of assets to drive the consumption and productization of those applications.

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CHAPTER 6

New Markets or RegionsFinding growth in new markets or regions is challenging because it often requires businesses to take a step back, analyze what works, and adjust for the new market. For example, a business looking to enter the financial services market from high tech must have a process to address regulatory concerns and questions coming from prospects.

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Define and Implement Sales ProcessesA common mistake businesses make when entering new markets is assuming their original sales strategy is perfect as is, and not staying flexible and adapting to best suit the demands of the new target audience. There is a high chance that your company will not get it completely right at first, so the ability to adapt your sales processes quickly is key to success. New buyers means that addressing their needs may be different than expected. As your sales people gain experience, they need the ability to share information internally so processes can be improved.

IDENTIFY and Track KPIsIn order to properly track the success of entering a new market, clearly defined milestones such as sales targets and market share need to be decided upon with all the key stakeholders. All campaigns and targets need to be communicated to the relevant personnel, and clear ownership needs to be assigned for each of these processes to ensure transparency in evaluations. Technology should be used to measure the effectiveness of your sales process so leaders can translate activities that move pipe into best practices to be spread throughout the new market’s sales teams.

Unlock InsightsIncorporating third-party data and projections into your sales forecast is critical to refine your strategy and align to a target market’s growth rates, forecasted demand, competitors, and potential barriers to entry. Sales processes need to be defined, orchestrated, and communicated for all activities, such as which sales cycle will be followed and how will leads be pursued and closed.

There is a high chance that your company will not get it completely right at first, so the ability to adapt your sales processes quickly is key to success.

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CONCLUSION

From Strategy to ActionThe pressure to grow can be crushing if you don’t have a solid strategy, and the tools to implement it and monitor performance. Whether you decide to merge with or acquire another company, introduce new products, try new routes to market, or explore new markets or regions, you’ll benefit from the work to plan, track, and adapt with modern methods and technology.

Salesforce has worked with thousands of customers who have gone through many of these scenarios, and can partner with you to take the right approach for your business. We’d love to help you expand strategically.

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